Youth Opinion : Which Is Worse, Sleazy or Censorious?
My father once told me that when he first landed in Vietnam at the age of 19 as an infantryman during the war, he knew after 15 minutes that he’d made a big mistake.
Now I’ve never been surrounded on a hill by the Viet Cong for a week with little water and no food, and I’ve never fallen on a patch of punji sticks and felt poison seep into my body. But I have worked in mainstream media, both print and television. And when I compare my experience to my father’s stories, I sometimes wonder which is worse.
Two summers ago, I interned at prominent local news stations. I was 19 and very excited about working in a broadcast setting.
But like my father before me, I knew almost instantly that it was going to be an ugly road ahead. If you’ve seen the movie “Broadcast News,” you know what I witnessed for an entire summer.
Three times each week I’d wake up at 5:30 A.M. and dress to the hilt, only to spend an entire day filing tapes, taking messages, cataloging stories, delivering memos from one end of the studio to the other, watching people gossip viciously about their colleagues and getting chewed out by my superiors (read: everyone).
But you can learn a lot doing grunt work.
One day, the producer in charge dumped me at the assignment desk along with two other college interns. Our job? To answer the phones. For hours we witnessed the smog accumulate on the Hollywood hillside as we either transferred calls to more important people or answered inane questions, like whether “One Life to Live” was going to air that day or whether we’d be showing the Simpson case instead.
Then I got a disturbing phone call.
“Assignment desk.” I said
“Is this the assignment desk?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, ma’am this is indeed the assignment desk.”
“Please help me.” She was crying. “The water’s brown, it’s been brown for weeks.”
“What water?”
“From the faucet!”
Good god, you idiot, I thought to myself. What other water would this woman be talking about?
“And the bastard landlord won’t do nothin’ about it,” she continued. “I told him I had rights and he just laughed.”
“Did you call the authorities?” I inquired.
“Are you crazy, woman?” she blared. “This is the last thing on their mind! This place is a damn slum, roaches and brown water and things falling apart--and no one’ll help me, no one.”
“Not even your neighbors?”
“Jesus, the whole damn block’s livin’ the same way!”
I took down her address and directions to her tenement and said I’d call back.
“Mike!” I called out. Mike was the one who really allocated assignments to reporters.
He turned nonchalantly to me as he munched on a tuna sandwich.
“Mike, I said as I handed him the address, “I think I have a good assignment!”
“Yeah?”
“There’s this woman; she just called,” I explained. “She was crying and telling me that the tap water had been brown for weeks and that everyone around her was living in a slum and no one would do anything about it!”
Mike looked at me like he wanted to slap me. “And that’s it?”
I frowned. “That’s it?”
“That’s all you have to tell me?”
“Well, yes, yes that’s what I came here for.”
He sighed. “Like I give a damn.” Then he took another bite of his sandwich. “There’s a million other people like her in this city. So [expletive] what?” Then he tossed the address into the trash. “Go back to your desk and answer the phone.”
A few minutes later, the phone rang. Some public relations guy, telling me to locate the head producer. Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson had tied the knot somewhere in the Carribbean. I transferred the call. Twenty minutes later, the airwaves spoke of little else.
As student journalists and editors, staff at the Daily Bruin face this dilemma daily--balancing entertainment with issue-oriented news.
It is never easy. As much as I don’t like to admit it, fun subjects attract the most readers. People like pictures of slam dunks and stories detailing long-bomb touchdowns. People like full page spreads on their favorite rock and roll band. Market reports tell us so.
Not that there’s anything wrong with such things, but there’s more going on around us than just fun and games.
It’s sad--at least to me--that the majority of readers find anything political to be a major turnoff.
Unless it’s a pretty major event and people feel personally threatened in some way, they ignore it and continue to play hacky-sack outside Taco Bell or chain-smoke on the steps of Kerckhoff Hall.
As far as I know, that woman who called the TV station two years ago may still live in squalor, along with her entire neighborhood. As we speak, a small council of mostly old men up in Northern California are going to decide, once and for all, who for the next generation--or more--will or will not get a decent chance at higher education.
And at this moment in our country’s history, the Army would rather have me for a soldier--even though I’m nowhere near patriotic--than Huong Nguyen, an ROTC cadet at UCLA who currently faces discharge despite her love for America. Why? Because I prefer to kiss men whereas she kisses women.
So I’m at a loss, both as the editor of the paper and as a regular student. I’m at a loss because I allow an anti-abortion insert to run in the paper and I get phone calls saying, “I’m offended.”
I’m at a loss because I permit an anti-feminist columnist who calls himself Princeton Kim to run on the commentary page, and in response I get letters addressed to me personally from women who accuse me of poor editorial judgment and of betraying the feminist cause with these “repulsive” ideas.
I’m not going to be the one shutting up the Princeton Kims of this world. If we claim to be journalists, we have to let the ugly things show, too. They are real, they are powerful and like it or not, they make a difference. We cannot--and we will not--toss them in the wastebasket and pretend they don’t exist.